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Industrial climate disruption – the disruption of the global climate as a result of human activity, especially our industrial consumption of fossil fuels – is more or less settled scientific fact. In order for industrial climate disruption to be incorrect, over a century of well-established science would have to be overturned. Some of the established science that would need to be significantly wrong include the Stefan-Boltzmann Law (thermal radiation from a body in space), quantum mechanics, significant portions of chemistry, radioisotope dating and profiling, several laws relating to the behavior of gases, and innumerable measurements of the fundamental physical properties of materials. As an example, if quantum mechanics were significantly wrong, that would mean that microwave ovens, carbon dioxide industrial cutting lasers, and most of modern electronics and electronic imaging would all work differently from how quantum mechanics predicts.

The problem for libertarians is that accepting human responsibility for climate disruption creates a threat to their values. The Iyer et al paper detailed in Part One of this series found that libertarians are fundamentally driven by a single moral good, specifically the liberty to be left alone to do as they pleased. Industrial climate disruption challenges both the primacy of personal liberty and, as a result, libertarians are highly motivated to reject the reality of industrial climate disruption.

Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning

There’s always a reason when a person denies something. That reason may be based on fact and verifiable reality, such as someone rejecting a claim that the sky is a beautiful shade of paisley. But sometimes denial is based not on facts, but rather on belief, values, or personality. For example, there is no question that the earth is older than 6,000 years old, yet fundamentalist Christians known as “young-Earth creationists” deny that fact because it conflicts with their literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. When beliefs or values conflict with fact and verifiable reality, certain psychological effects either force us to change our beliefs or to deny both fact and reality.

When people learn new things, they can suffer from a psychological condition known as cognitive dissonance. Simply put, cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling you get when you are trying to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas at the same time. What happens is the person feeling cognitive dissonance wants to eliminate their discomfort and quickly and as thoroughly as possible. In the example above, a young-Earth creationist who was also a paleontologist would have to either change his views about the age of the Earth or rationalize a reason for why God would want to deceive humanity into thinking the earth was 4.5 billion years old.

One way to alleviate cognitive dissonance is with another psychological effect known as confirmation bias. This is the process by which a person only seeks out or remembers only that information which confirms his or her existing beliefs while ignoring or forgetting information in conflict with those beliefs. Confirmation bias can also relate to the way in which a person interprets new information such that it supports his or her existing beliefs, whether the new information actually supports those beliefs or not.

Interpreting new information in a way that supports your own beliefs can reduce cognitive dissonance, but sometimes it’s more than that. Confirmation bias can also be part of what’s known as motivated reasoning. The modern concept of motivated reasoning began with a 1990 paper by Ziva Kunda, and he found that people let their personal motivations affect their reasoning. For example, if a person discovered that a coworker was behaving unethically at work, the person might be motivated to reject the information because he or she didn’t want to report the coworker to a superior for disciplinary action. Motivated reasoning is the process by which the facts are mentally adjusted in order to conform to a desired outcome instead of adjusting the outcome to conform with the facts.

A classic example of motivated of motivated reasoning goes something like this: it’s difficult to convince someone to accept something when their job depends on not accepting it. In this case, the outcome motivating the denial is the desire to stay employed. Many libertarians use motivated reasoning to reject the reality of industrial climate disruption because it is more than a mere threat to their jobs – industridal climate disruption is a threat to their most deeply held libertarian values.

Industrial climate disruption threatens libertarian values

According to Iyer et al, libertarians essentially have a single moral good – liberty. Specifically, they value the idea of “negative” liberty, which is defined as the right to do with your life and possessions whatever you please so long as you don’t infringe upon the right of others to do the same. Iyer et al also found that libertarians very strongly valued self-direction (the right of individuals to make their own choices in life) and achievement, more so than either conservatives or liberals.

The problem is that these values conflict with the strategies that have been proposed to adapt to and mitigate the effects of industrial climate disruption. As a result, libertarians have strong motivations to deny that industrial climate disruption is a problem.

By its very nature, industrial climate disruption is a global problem, and so the most effective responses to it will also be global in nature. Strategies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (the dominant cause of industrial climate disruption) will necessarily require cooperation among nations, communities, and individuals. Similarly, strategies to adapt to those effects that cannot be mitigated, such as increased incidence of river flooding and higher coastal storm surges, will greatly affect individuals as well as communities.

From a libertarian’s perspective, if industrial climate disruption is real, then his property rights are likely to be limited “for the greater good.” But there is no such thing as a “greater good” to a libertarian than individual rights, so right away this entire approach would be unacceptable to a libertarians. Furthermore, reducing greenhouse gas emissions could very well mean that more land needs to be cleared and easements across private property purchased for power lines to carry renewable energy from wherever it’s generated to the communities and industries that consume it. Or maybe some land would need to be seized by the government via eminent domain to build a wind turbine to generate electricity for someone else. Or maybe the property is located near sea level where models project the ocean will make the land unsuitable for habitation in 50 years. In these cases the libertarian would be motivated to reject any science that results in outcomes that are so contrary to his values.

But it goes beyond just property rights. According to Iyer et al, libertarians generally value altruism much lower than either conservatives or liberals, and they value egalitarianism lowest of all. Multiple analyses have demonstrated that the effects of industrial climate disruption will disproportionately affect the poor, and so one of the adaptation strategies planned is to provide additional aid to the poor. One example is the government helping to pay any increase in energy bills due to pricing greenhouse gases. But libertarians reject these kinds of aid (along with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) because they interfere with the right of the wealthy to spend their wealth however they see fit. If industrial climate disruption means limiting economic liberty, then that provides yet another motivation for libertarians to deny industrial climate disruption.

In addition, both of the prior examples would require a strong national government in order to push through the kinds of changes needed to effectively address industrial climate disruption. A strong national government means a government that has the power to restrict individual liberties, and libertarians simply cannot accept that.

An example: values-motivated arguments regarding climate sensitivity

As shown above, industrial climate disruption is clearly a threat to the liberties that libertarians value the most. This means that there is tremendous motivation for libertarians to rationalize away the threat. Iyer et al found that libertarians are more systemizing than empathizing, meaning that they are more interested in systems with equations and variables to be fiddled with than they are interested in people’s emotions. This focus on rational systems makes libertarians particularly good at motivated reasoning – they’ll go hunting for data, process that data in a way that is subject to their confirmation biases against industrial climate disruption, and then create a superficially reasonable rationale for why the science is wrong.

We can illustrate this process in one of the many arguments that libertarians make against various aspects of climate science, specifically the argument that climate scientists have miscalculated how much the global temperature will increase as a result of a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, aka the “climate sensitivity.” Deniers of industrial climate disruption often refer to the work of Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer, both of whom claim that climate sensitivity is well below the generally accepted range of 3.6 to 8.1 °F (2.0 to 4.5 °C). Lindzen proposed a hypothesis in 2001 that climate sensitivity was much lower because there was an “iris” in the tropics that would result in more efficient radiation of heat from the tropics into space. But that hypothesis was rapidly challenged, and other scientists have repeatedly shown errors in Lindzen’s work that cast significant doubt on the “iris effect.”

Roy Spencer has an alternate, but also cloud-related, hypothesis that not only suggests that climate sensitivity is low, but that nearly every other climate scientist on the planet is wrong about the feedback mechanism between tropical clouds and the El Nino/Southern Oscillation. Spencer’s latest version of the hypothesis was thoroughly refuted by at two independent scientific papers and the problems found with the paper were so severe that the editor of the journal that published the paper resigned as a way to restore the journal’s credibility.

There are dozens of papers that are based on multiple different lines of evidence (bottom-up climate models, directly measured temperatures, ice cores, even the measured response of the Earth’s climate to the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo) that contradict both Lindzen and Spencer and that calculate climate sensitivity to be approximately in the accepted range – some are somewhat higher or lower, depending on the exact calculation methodology and data used. Yet libertarians regularly refer to one or the other of the two men as having the best estimates of climate sensitivity that is strictly based on observations instead of models. That both men use simplified models of their own devising (and that those models have been regularly found to be too simple for the purpose of estimating climate sensitivity) seems to be forgotten or justified in the service of reasoning away the reality of industrial climate disruption.

Another factor that is probably in play in libertarian arguments against high climate sensitivity is how libertarians process arguments. According to Iyer et al, libertarians focus on data and logic over “intangibles” like appearance or perceived credibility. This generally a good thing, but it can be taken too far, especially with respect to perceived credibility.

Lindzen and Spencer are both reasonably well-respected scientists. Lindzen is a professor at MIT and a member of the National Academy of Sciences because of his contributions to atmospheric physics. Spencer, along with his University of Alabama-Huntsville colleague John Christy, developed a methodology by which satellites could measure the Earth’s temperature at multiple altitudes using microwaves. But Lindzen and Spencer also have some credibility problems that should raise red flags about their objectivity on the issue of industrial climate disruption for anyone who’s reasoning is motivated by accuracy instead of ideology.

First, Lindzen has a decades-long history of proposing hypotheses about how the Earth’s climate works that have mostly turned out to be wrong. For a rundown of this by climate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert during his American Geophysical Union Tyndall lecture, skip ahead to about 33 minutes in the following video:

While Lindzen is often wrong, his questions and alternate hypotheses have largely improved the state of climate science and he’s mostly backed down from his ideas when they were thoroughly refuted. The same cannot necessarily be said for Spencer. Spencer and Christy have had to make at multiple significant corrections to their satellite temperature dataset, nearly all of which they had to make after others found problems with the satellites (annual variation in calibration targets, satellite orbital drift and decay, et al).

Table of most of the corrections made by UAH team to satellite record of global temperature.

In addition, in 2012, Spencer manipulated the editor of the journal Remote Sensing into publishing a paper that purported to demonstrate that climate sensitivity was low. However, Spencer had provided a list of friendly reviewers to the editor and so the fundamentally flawed paper sailed through palpeer review with little to no oversight. Once the editor discovered he’d been used, he offered Spencer’s critics the opportunity to respond to Spencer in the journal and resigned as editor to restore the journal’s scientific credibility.

Finally, Spencer is a member of industrial climate disruption-denying, dominionist evangelical group the Cornwall Alliance. He wrote the science section of the Alliance’s white paper titled “A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor,” a document that is filled with misinformation and denial. This is perhaps not a surprise given Spencer’s history and his evangelical faith. But the same document’s “Theology” section justifies denying predictions of sea level rise by saying that God swore he’d never send another flood (p15), and elsewhere on the same page the document says that the last ice age was a direct result of Noah’s Flood. These claims are in direct conflict with scientific theories and data about ice ages and ice sheet formation. While Spencer himself did not write the theology section, his association with a group that is more interested in making data fit their theology than looking clearly at what the data raises serious questions about Spencer’s scientific credibility on the subject of industrial climate disruption.

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Iyer et al found that libertarians need to examine things, to feel rational, before they make decisions. This strong need to be and feel rational does nothing to protect a libertarian from cognitive dissonance or to insulate them from confirmation bias. And it does nothing to immunize libertarians from rationalizing away inconvenient data or conclusions that threaten their values. If anything, the libertarian need to feel rational makes libertarians more prone to motivated reasoning, not less – the more you know about a subject, the more susceptible to motivated reasoning you become.

No-one, of any ideology, is fundamentally immune to motivated reasoning. But libertarians tend to be highly motivated by industrial climate disruption because it threatens their core values. High motivation plus easily available misinformation equals lots of opportunity for confirmation bias to manipulate reasoning.

Given all these facts it’s no wonder that there are so many libertarians among the ranks of industrial climate disruption deniers.

In Part Four we’ll look closer at why engineers deny climate disruption.

Most new engineering graduates suffer some form of culture shock after they enter the workforce. The main reason for this is that most engineers exit college with a limited understanding of the business world and the many restrictions that are associated with it. In addition, the corporate environment is radically different from the academic environment engineers had become used to over their four or more years of education, and adjusting can be psychologically traumatic for the first few months to years. I personally know several engineers who couldn’t adapt to the corporate world and instead went back to academia to get a PhD and do research engineering instead of product development.

Most engineers do adapt eventually to the environment of a for-profit, cost- and schedule-constrained job where projects can and often are canceled based on the whim of a customer or changing marketplace conditions. For them the corporate environment permanently alters how they perceive the world and what they value. It’s not possible to spend a third or more of your life in any environment, corporate or not, without that environment affecting you in some way.

General factors in the corporate environment affect engineers’ values

Corporations that make money by designing and manufacturing products tend to be tightly focused on the immediate effects those products will have on the company’s profits. The profit motive is itself usually driven by investors who expect regular dividends and/or perpetually increasing stock value. As a result, the corporation itself, as represented by its upper-level management, usually ends up devaluing employees in favor of investors.

An engineers in this environment often find that he is considered little more than a commodity, just another cog in the product development machine that will be replaced by a fresh face when he wears out. There are only two ways an engineer can avoid this fate – he can become an irreplaceable expert on some aspect of the company’s technology, or he can commit himself completely to the health of the company, often to the detriment of other aspects of his life such as his personal relationships or physical health. During my years as an engineer, I have worked with dozens of engineers who were so focused on their projects that their wives divorced them or they suffered heart attacks while on the job.

For an engineer who has the drive and technical skill to become an expert, there are a number of pitfalls he is likely to encounter. First, the engineer will likely become less receptive to logical, technically sound criticism from other engineers. Second, the engineer will tend to think that his expertise in one area makes him an expert in other areas that that may or may not be related. This usually results in the engineer valuing his own opinions higher than that of actual experts. In both cases it becomes harder for others to change the expert’s mind. Doing so often often takes bashing through the expert’s obstinacy with an overwhelming amount of information or outflanking it in some way. In either case, however, it may well take threatening the expert’s view of his own expertise to get him to admit error.

Most engineers working in corporations won’t become experts, however. There can only be a few experts in any given company, and the smaller the company, the fewer positions of expertise there are. Most engineers will instead focus on the daily grunt work of designing and building quality products, making their designs efficient and inexpensive, and in the process boost the company’s profits and their pay. As a result, engineers naturally take on some of the corporation’s values as their own. Engineers are motivated to do so because a profitable company is one where engineers get raises and holiday bonuses instead of being laid off. Similarly, engineers will tend to conclude that what is good for their employers is good for them (and by extension good for their community, state, country, and maybe even for the world), regardless of whether that is actually the case.

Similarly, when corporations only plan a few years ahead it’s only natural that their employees would come to devalue long-term planning. This is especially bad in the consumer electronics space, where electronics are designed to be thrown out and replaced in a year or two or are intended to only operate correctly for a short period of time. Engineers who work in corporations where long-term planning is largely absent (or isolated from the rank and file) will tend not to plan for the long term themselves. Some will take it a step further and conclude that nothing beyond the the next five years or so even matters. After all, only the rarest engineer finds that his work is still valued five years after it was created, so why worry about it? And since companies can’t reliably anticipate market conditions five years from now, why should the engineer plan his own life that far out? He might be laid off, transferred to a different state, or go into business for himself by that point – planning just takes time and creates stress if your life doesn’t go according to that plan, so why bother.

Cost-cutting on the engineer’s mind

It’s natural that the corporate profit motive and short-term thinking would shift engineers’ values in a similar direction. But this effect is actually relatively small compared to two other effects. Specifically, engineers fresh out of college quickly learn that there are only two ways a company stays profitable and grows – cutting costs and increasing revenues. And they also learn that the easiest, and thus preferred, option is always to cut costs.

While there are many different ways that a corporation can cut costs, they simplify down to a few general types. The corporation can lay off people. It can cut benefits, specifically health and retirement benefits. It can lobby for fewer and cheaper government regulations. It can outsource or offshore design and/or manufacturing. It can become more operationally efficient. Or it can find cheaper parts out of which to make its products. Of all of these options, engineers learn quickly that they actually have little to no control over the bulk of them.

Corporations tend to use euphemisms to describe their employees, and people in general. Employees aren’t “employees” at all – they’re “resources.” These days many corporations have even gone so far as to euphemize “layoffs” into a “reduction in force.” Anyone who works in an environment where people are dehumanized in this way will naturally become less empathic with the plight of other human beings. Engineers tend to be introverts who have difficulty relating to other people anyway, so their loss of empathy is likely to be more apparent than most.

Furthermore, most corporations view health and retirement benefits as a cost of doing business, not as a benefit that keeps their employees healthy and productive. As a result, engineers eventually come to devalue benefits when provided by governments or non-governmental organizations. And since regulations increase the cost of doing business, engineers tend to view regulations as just one more thing that can result in the loss of their jobs. When your job may depend on rejecting additional regulations and cutting entitlement programs, it’s a rare engineer who is going to support those regulations and entitlements.

Efficiency can be a double-edged sword, a fact that most engineers learn quickly. For example, engineers initially supported outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing as a cost savings and efficiency improvement, but their support waned when they realized that their jobs could also be outsourced or offshored. And when improved efficiency means that an engineer becomes a “redundant resource” and he loses his job, suddenly efficiency improvements aren’t quite so good anymore. But when improved efficiency means reducing the company’s energy bills, cheaper processes, or things that result in job losses for other people, most engineers tend to be strong supporters of efficiency. After all, making something more efficient is a technical design challenge for an engineer, and engineers love challenges.

Finally, engineers work hard to find cheaper solutions and figure out ways to use the cheapest parts they can. This means that engineers come to realize that it’s good for the company to do as little as possible to get the job done. While this comes into direct conflict with another engineering value, namely their perfectionism, in a corporate setting, doing just what’s necessary eventually wins. Doing more takes longer and costs more, and that’s a waste of money. Engineers apply this same corporate value to their wider lives, doing as little as possible in the social and political arenas – and expecting little in return.

Increasing revenues: risky and uncertain

While there is always a strong focus on cutting costs during any product development, engineers are ultimately tasked with designing products that are supposed to increase revenues and, in the process, boost profits. As with cost-cutting, there are only so many ways that a corporation can increase its revenues. A corporation can develop a new product that will sell for more than they cost to design and manufacture. A corporation can cut prices on existing products if the revenues from increased sales will exceed the losses from the price cut. A corporation can offer incentives to purchase products if the increased sales revenues will exceed the costs of the incentives. Finally, a corporation can raise prices on existing products if the resulting increase in revenue is greater than the loss of revenue due to lower sales.

Every new engineer learns a critical fact on their first or second project – every new products is subject to strict calculations of return on investment (ROI). ROI is a calculation of how quickly the company can recoup the money it spent over the course of the development cycle. The longer the development cycle, the less profit the new product will make, the lower the ROI. Products that have too low of an ROI will either never be made or can be canceled at any point during the development cycle. While engineers are not the ones who generally perform the ROI calculations, they do provide a significant amount of the cost data that is used in the calculations. As a result, engineers learn how to apply this strict mathematical process to their own designs and eventually start using variations of ROI in their lives outside the corporation.

The problem with using ROI in the real world is that many things resist being valued in monetary terms. It’s inherently difficult, perhaps even impossible, to place a monetary value the extinction of a species or the damage to the spiritual practices of an indigenous people. There are only two approaches, and those engineers who don’t just throw up their hands in frustration will chose one or the other. First, you can make assumptions about what is valuable and making a wild-ass-guess (a WAG, in technical terminology). Second, you can conclude that anything that is impossible to attach a value to must therefore have no value.

In the corporate world, incentives to buy a product are always short lived and subject to the whim of the company or individual offering the incentive. Many engineers get caught by unscrupulous part suppliers who offer incentives to buy a part that end immediately after the part has been designed into a new product – and after it becomes too expensive to design the part back out of the product. So engineers learn not to trust incentives. When those same engineers look beyond their job, they discover that the world is full of incentives also known as “subsidies.” Those subsidies are subject to the whim of someone else (usually politicians) and that just might go away right after your employer broke ground on a new factory that needs the subsidy to be profitable. And so engineers tend not to trust subsidies either.

The last way that a company can increase revenues to raise prices. Raising prices is a high risk, low reward decision that can drive away customers, and because corporations work so hard to avoid this option, engineers come to understand that raising prices is the last resort. Logically, then, engineers conclude that resorting to raising prices means that the engineers have failed – failed to find cost savings, failed to produce new products in a timely manner, failed to eke out more efficiency. For better or worse, engineers come to see raising taxes becomes just as much a failure of government and politicians as raising prices is a failure of the corporation and its engineers.

Personality traits of engineers

There are reasons that people become engineers in the first place. Those reasons are related in part to having a creative mind and an aptitude for mathematics and science, but base personality matters too.

Going beyond the traditional Myers-Briggs or Big 5 personality traits, engineers have a number of traits that represent the stereotypical, “average” engineer. Engineers tend to be able to focus intently on tasks. Engineers tend to be highly reliant on their personal experience and resistant to changes that run counter to that experience. Engineers tend to enjoy applying their skills to problem solving and like working to well-defined requirements in a system where the rules are well known. And engineers often prefer working alone to working in groups.

Engineers are usually so good at focusing on the task at hand that they suffer from “tunnel vision” and ignore other things until the task is complete. This is a highly desirable trait for corporations because it often means that engineers are happy to work long hours in order to finish their designs on time and under budget. But it also means that engineers generally aren’t great multitaskers. And it can be hard to get an engineer who has “always done it this way” to perform their job differently. Finally, it means that engineers find it more difficult than most people to change gears from a work mentality to a home mentality when the workday ends.

As a result, engineers are often workaholics, resistant to change, and dogmatic in their approach to doing their job and toward their peers. Being resistant to change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because changing too much, too fast can lead to chaos. But if resisting change prevents professional growth or impedes a company’s ability to adapt to new market realities, it does become a bad thing. Often corporations find that the easiest way to change the culture in their engineering departments is to bring in new ideas from outside the company instead of promoting from within.

Furthermore, experienced engineers can become dogmatic about their experience, treating their expert opinion as fact. This results in engineers who are unwilling to accept criticism even when the criticism is reasonable. Engineers who can’t handle reasonable criticism or who lose their ability to adjust to new processes, procedures, or technological advances essentially makes themselves obsolete.

That said, engineers are usually more open to criticism in the context of a discussion or debate about their work. Debating the merits and flaws of a design provides an engineer with an opportunity to learn new ways of doing something in a logical forum. In many ways, engineers implicitly respect the concept of a “marketplace of ideas” when applied to their work. This is partly because such debates have rules and the decision criteria are well known to all participants – for example, does the design meet all the requirements. But if the rules are in flux due to a change in project management, or if the requirements are ambiguous, many engineers will find something else to do until things settle down again. Some engineers work OK with poorly defined requirements, but even they tend to fill in the gaps with documented assumptions that are later approved or rejected by management or the customer.

Finally, engineers tend to be introverts, preferring to work alone over working with others or socializing. This usually isn’t a problem for a starting engineer, but becomes a greater impediment as he gains experience. Eventually every engineer has to work with someone else, or needs to talk to a customer or supplier. That’s when the engineer’s typical lack of social skills can become a serious liability to the corporation and to the engineer himself. Put another way, few engineers are natural diplomats, preferring to apply the same black and white approach that serves them in their work to the many shades of gray inherent to social interaction.

Connections between engineers and libertarians

The values and personality traits of engineers that were described above have strong parallels with the personality traits and moral values of libertarians that were identified in Part 1 of this series. While not all engineers are libertarians and vice versa, the common values and personalities clearly indicate that there are going to be a lot of engineers who are libertarians, and a lot of libertarians who are engineers.

The first trait that engineers and libertarians share is that individuals in both groups tend to be introverted. Engineers work alone as a matter of course in their professional lives, usually working on one part of a project that is siloed off from other parts of the same project. According to the Iyer et al study discussed in Part 1, libertarians were more introverted than either liberals or conservatives on the Big 5 personality traits test and highly valued peer-to-peer individualism (equality of freedom among all individuals).

Introversion tends to be associated with a general lack of social skills among engineers, a trait that libertarians also share. Libertarians’ lack of social skills is a result of their general inability to empathize with others compared to that of conservatives and liberals. If you can’t empathize with the personal distress of others or you simply don’t care about responding appropriately to other people’s emotions, two common libertarians traits identified by Iyer et al, then you’ll have a difficult time determining the right thing to say in a social situation and you probably won’t care about whether you offend someone or not. Engineers share this trait with libertarians not just because of both groups’ common introversion, but also because the corporate engineering experience teaches engineers to devalue people as mere “resources” that can be shed as needed to cut costs. Even people who empathize normally with others will eventually start to dehumanize their peers out of a need for emotional self-protection.

Engineers tend to adopt the values of their employer as their own, another factor that places engineers and libertarians on common ground. Engineers tend to feel that regulations on business are bad because they cost the business money. Libertarians reject regulations because they feel that everyone should be allowed to spend their money however they see fit. And because companies value everything in monetary terms, often within strict ROI calculations, engineers tend to look at politics and policies through the lens of ROI and related calculations of value. Libertarians, by their nature more interested in thinking than feeling, are also attracted to anything that can reduce vagueness to easily calculated and manipulated variables.

Libertarians need to feel rational about their moral decisions, and that need to feel rational is part of what drives them to distill life down into systems with variables and equations that can be solved. Similarly, a significant part of an engineer’s professional life is working within the mathematics that define physical laws. Libertarians are good at suppressing their intuitive reflexes in order find the logically correct answer (as opposed to the intuitive, but wrong, answer), while an engineers who couldn’t do this wouldn’t survive long as an engineer.

Finally, engineers who are not content to be mere cogs in the corporate product development machine will rise to become technical experts in the company. Expert engineers share a desire for achievement that Iyer et al identified with libertarians in general. Unfortunately, expert engineers can become dogmatic and resistant to change if they’re not careful, and that can lead them to ignore reasonable criticism from others who have different, but more valid, experience. Libertarians have a similar resistance to listening to others, especially listening to authorities who are trying to tell the libertarians what to think or how to behave.

While there are a number of other characteristics that engineers and libertarians do not necessarily share, none of those characteristics are incompatible with being both a libertarian and and engineer.

Corporations are strange places to work, especially corporations that exist to design, manufacture, and sell goods. Corporations are focused so tightly on increasing profits today that they tend to focus on the short-term and to value everything – time, people, heat, light, health – in monetary terms. Engineers who work in places like this are nearly all focused on things instead of people, and it takes a certain personality to thrive in that kind of environment.

In order to succeed in this type of environment, engineers need to be logical thinkers who can turn their instincts on and off almost at will. They need to be able to focus on solving a problem to the exclusion of everything else. And as a result, engineers will tend to be more comfortable with things and twiddling equations than they are relating to other people.

The personality characteristics and values of engineers are similar to the defining characteristics and values of libertarians. So it’s not a surprise that many engineers are also libertarians.

In Part 3 we’ll look at why so many engineers and libertarians reject the overwhelming science in support of the industrial causes of climate disruption.

Industrial climate disruption, aka climate change or global warming, is perhaps the most important issue that humanity has ever faced. Scientists have concluded based on an overwhelming amount of data and over a century of well established and verified science that humanity has probably never faced the kind of disruptions to our world that are coming as a result of our emissions of greenhouse gases. But there is small and vocal minority of people who reject the science and data underlying this conclusion, and in the United States those deniers have successfully convinced the bulk of the Republican party to act as if that science is wrong and doesn’t matter.

Ever since I encountered my first example of a climate disruption denier I’ve wondered what kind of person could deny the reality that is industrial climate disruption. Over the years of writing on climate, however, it became clear that there were two groups of people who made up the majority of the serious deniers – libertarians and engineers of various stripes. As an electrical engineer myself, however, I didn’t understand how individuals trained in mathematics, science, and logic could fail to see glaring scientific, mathematical, physical, or logical flaws in their own arguments. Eventually, though, something clicked: most of the engineers I work with today and have worked with since earning my MSEE are either libertarians themselves or have some libertarian leanings.

This is the first part of a series of posts exploring the personality traits and moral values of libertarians, engineers, and the relationship of those traits and values to the denial of industrial climate disruption.

Libertarians: a distinct personality profile and moral ideal

If you think about the stereotypical traits we tend to attribute to libertarians – pro-small government, pro-property rights, anti-regulation, and anti-taxes, to name a few – it makes some logical sense that they’d be more inclined to reject the science supporting climate disruption. After all, if climate disruption requires government intervention, higher taxes, and restricts what a libertarian can do with his property, then he’d naturally oppose those types of solutions. But that resistance doesn’t explain why libertarians oppose the science itself instead of simply opposing policies that might be implemented as a result of the science.

In August, 2012, several researchers studying the psychology of political ideology released the results of three psychological studies they had performed into the values and personality traits of self-identified libertarians. The researchers compared the self-identified libertarians to self-identified liberals and conservatives and then compared and contrasted their values and personality traits. This paper (hereafter Iyer et al) concluded that libertarians were not merely a point on the traditional liberal/conservative values scale, but rather that libertarianism represented a third, unique approach that is distinct from both liberal and conservative values.

This paper served as the starting point for my investigation into why so many libertarians deny the reality of industrial climate disruption. But before we can understand their denial, we must first understand exactly what personality traits libertarians have and what they value.

Liberty as the only moral good

According to Iyer et al, libertarians really have only a single moral good – freedom from restrictions on their actions, or what Iyer et al call “negative” liberty. This differs from the more common “positive” liberty in that positive liberty means having the opportunity to pursue one’s own interests. In terms that many Americans are familiar with, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances described in the First Amendment of the US Constitution is a form of positive liberty, while having the freedom to do anything you want so long as it doesn’t interfere with the right of others to do the same is a form of negative liberty.

But Iyer et al indicate that this moral good is not well measured by traditional studies of morality, writing that “standard morality scales… do a poor job of measuring libertarian values” and that “if liberty is included as a moral value, libertarians are not amoral.” The flip side of this statement, however, means that libertarians do not share a common moral framework with either liberals or conservatives.

The data in Iyer et al demonstrate that libertarians have a similar profile (the relative order of importance of various values) to liberals on one test of moral values, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ). Specifically, libertarians rate fairness highest, followed by harm, and both groups value authority and purity the least. But Iyer et al indicates that libertarians don’t think about fairness and harm in the same ways that liberals do – harm to a liberal often means injury to someone else, while harm to a libertarian means injury to the libertarian by others. Conservatives valued authority and being associated with the “in” group the most, above both harm and fairness.

This pattern of valuing the welfare of others less than one’s own welfare was again seen in the data from the Schwartz Values Scale. Given there are ten different values in this scale (instead of the five in the MFQ), there were more differences between libertarians, liberals, and conservatives. While all three groups valued self-direction the highest, libertarians valued it more than liberals and far more than conservatives. Libertarians valued achievement just after self-direction and over all the other values (benevolence, conformity, hedonism, power, security, stimulation, tradition, or universalism). According to Iyer et al, the libertarian profile looks “somewhat like liberals,” but with lower value placed on benevolence and universalism, the two Schwartz values that relate to caring about the welfare of others.

When Iyer et al looked at ethical positions, they found that libertarians were more likely to consider ethics “situational” instead of universal. This means that libertarians are more likely to feel that what is ethically acceptable varies from one situation to another. Iyer et al suggest that this is because libertarians “live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g. altruism, respect for authority) are not assigned much importance.” This is supported by the original research upon which Iyer et al’s survey was based, which found that people with ethical profiles like those of libertarians

‘reject moral rules’ and ‘base moral judgements on personal feelings about the action and the setting.’

Iyer et al further investigated the low valuation libertarians of traditional authority with a questionnaire that directly measures “the extent to which people are emotionally resistant to restrictions on their behavioral freedom and to the advice and influence of others.” Conservatives were the least resistant, followed by liberals. Libertarians were the most resistant to accepting restrictions on their behavior and even to listening to the expert opinions of others.

When asked specifically about their interest in economic and lifestyle liberty, libertarians valued both types of liberty the highest, well over either liberals (who valued lifestyle over economic liberty) or conservatives (who valued economic over lifestyle liberty). In this case, Iyer et al defined “economic liberty” as the right of successful people to “enjoy their wealth as they see fit” and “lifestyle liberty” as the right of everyone to “be as free as they choose” within the limitation that their freedom not infringe upon others.

The Iyer et al studies conclusively demonstrated that the single libertarian moral good of liberty, specifically “negative” liberty, is quite different from the morals of either liberals or conservatives. This single moral good is the driving factor from which all other libertarian values are derived.

The rational ethos of libertarianism

Beyond the moral good of liberty that libertarians espouse, Iyer et al found that they also feel a greater need to be rational than, and to perceive themselves as more rational than, either liberals or conservatives.

When Iyer et al looked at the Big 5 personality traits (an alternative method of determining personality to Myers-Briggs personality types) of libertarians, they found that libertarians were largely open to new experiences, felt a strong need to think about things, and were more introverted than either liberals or conservatives. In more common Myers-Briggs terms, libertarians have an INTx profile, where the “x” could be either judging or perceiving (J/P).

When it came to difficult moral choices, libertarians’ need to be rational about their choices produced utilitarian results. For example, libertarians were more willing to sacrifice one person to save many than either liberals or conservatives, with conservatives being the least willing to logically reason out the need for one to die so many could live.

When faced with questions that had two different answers, one of which was correct and another that was intuitive, Iyer et al found that libertarians were more likely than either liberals or conservatives to choose the correct answer. Iyer et al was careful to point out that this result does not necessarily mean that libertarians are smarter than liberals or conservatives, only that libertarians are mentally better at suppressing the intuitive reflex.

Finally, Iyer et al also found that libertarians needed to formulate their opinions based on arguments and data instead of on “peripheral cues, such as how attractive or credible a speaker is.” Again, libertarians had a slightly greater need to think about things than liberals and a moderately greater need than conservatives.

In every case that Iyer et al looked at, libertarians needed to think more about things before forming judgements, usually somewhat more than liberals and much more than conservatives. One possibility for why this is could be that libertarians are psychologically more comfortable with systems that have black and white rules than they are with people who only come in shades of gray.

Systemizing over empathizing

Iyer et al looked specifically at the preference of libertarians for systemizing or empathizing. According to Iyer et al, the creators of this particular personality scale define systemizing as “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” Empathizing, on the other hand, is defined as “the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion.” Given that libertarians tend to be introverts who value being left alone to do as they please, it’s reasonable to expect that libertarians would also prefer systemizing more and empathizing less than liberals or conservatives.

What surprised Iyer et al was just how strongly libertarians are systemizers. While liberals valued empathizing more than systemizing, and conservatives valued both about the same (with a slight emphasis on empathizing), libertarians valued systemizing more than empathizing, and nearly as much as liberals valued empathizing.

This result describes what Iyer et al and others call a fundamentally “male” mental process, as opposed to the “female” liberal mental process of empathizing. But there’s a problem with this characterization, namely that libertarians are overwhelmingly male – 79.6% in Iyer et al and 67% in polls of the United States as a whole. Since correlation is not causation, it’s not possible to know with the data from the Iyer et al study whether this dominant systemizing mental process is because so many libertarians are men, or whether men are more likely to be attracted to libertarianism because it’s dominant mental process is systemization.

Independent and solitary

Iyer et al found that libertarians are weak empathizers, have a strong need for rationality over emotion, and value their independence. These traits come together in a number of ways to describe how libertarians relate, or perhaps fail to relate, to other people.

One of the Big 5 personality traits that Iyer et al looked at is extraversion, and a low score means that you’re more introverted than extraverted. Libertarians were more introverted than either liberals or conservatives, who were roughly equal with each other. When asked about how they empathized with others, libertarians were the only group to use the “put yourself in their shoes” type of empathizing more than any other type. Not only that, but libertarians empathized with others’ personal distress the least of all.

Iyer et al also compared libertarians’ relative level of individualism and collectivism to both liberals and conservatives. As expected, libertarians valued both competitive, hierarchical individualism and peer-to-peer, horizontal individualism more than either liberals or conservatives and more than either form of collectivism. Libertarians valued peer-to-peer collectivism, described in Iyer et al as characteristic of an egalitarian attitude, the least and moderately lower than either liberals or conservatives.

Libertarians and conservatives had similar profiles in the Iyer et al data for how much each group identified with the rest of humanity (as broken down into community, country, and the world). Both groups identified the most with their country, followed by their community, and lastly with the rest of the world. Liberals, on the other hand, identified with the world first, then community, and lastly their country. But libertarians identified the least with community and country, and only barely more with the rest of the world than conservatives did. Iyer et al wrote that this finding was “consistent with the libertarians’ desire for personal liberty.”

Finally, when Iyer et al looked at the data for how libertarians felt love toward their partners, family, friends, or “generic others,” Iyer et al found that libertarians feelings of love toward all four groups of people were the weakest of all when compared to liberals and conservatives. Libertarians’ feelings were the strongest toward their partners, but even those feelings were slightly weaker than the feelings that liberals and conservatives felt toward their partners. Feelings of love toward “generic others” were the lowest of all for libertarians. Iyer et al considered these results to be “noteworthy” because

differences between liberals and conservatives were generally small (except toward generic others). Libertarians were the outliers. [emphasis added]

Iyer et al are not able to turn the correlations in values and personality traits they observed among libertarians into causative relationships. The data from Iyer et al cannot say, for example, that libertarians’ focus on negative liberty as their single moral good is because libertarians tend to be introverted and unable to empathize with others.

Furthermore, while Iyer et al is based on a large sample of data, it is not necessarily representative of the entire population of libertarians. For example, the demographics of Iyer et al are somewhat different from a nationally representative poll conducted by the Pew Research Center on the People and the Press that also included a breakdown of libertarian demographics. For example, Iyer et al had a significantly greater percentage of men, a slightly greater number of whites, and about the same number of college educated respondents as the Pew poll did. The greater number of whites and males almost certainly skews the data some, but it’s not possible with the Iyer et al data to say how much.

But when you look at Iyer et al‘s conclusions, they match well to the profile that Pew used to differentiate between libertarians and other ideological groups in their poll. Pew’s data shows that most libertarians reject strict environmental laws, something that is expected given Iyer et al’s finding that libertarians are resistant to external factors that would impinge upon their personal liberty. Pew found that libertarians were accepting of homosexuality, which is also expected given Iyer et al’s findings that libertarians are relatively unmotivated by emotional “disgust” reactions and highly value horizontal, peer-to-peer individualism. So while a similar study to Iyer et al would almost certainly generate somewhat different results using a nationally representative poll of libertarians, it’s unlikely that the results would significantly change Iyer et al’s overall conclusions.

Finally, Iyer et al points out that entirely possible that the moral good of negative liberty that libertarians value more than any other may be a moralization of their personal preference for living free of too many entanglements. In a culture where morality is generally defined along lines that libertarians disagree with and don’t feel, it’s easy to see why libertarians would have an emotional need to redefine morality in a way that reduces their cognitive dissonance. But whether this is the case or not will require more studies than just Iyer et al.

As an engineer with some libertarian leanings myself, I found Iyer et al to be fascinating. It explained much about so many of my fellow engineers, so many of whom are also libertarians. In Part Two I’ll discuss how being an engineer and working for a corporation affects the perspectives and values of engineers.